What's going on with Namecoin?

[Mousepotato]

NMC has been on a tear lately.  I'm curious to know the reason behind the recent run up 

[Kettenmonster]

 ... are there any prenamed coins around? Possibly maybe we need more of them!

[Mousepotato]

Geez, 0.00900000 now!  It's coming back up!!!

[deepceleron]

A few considerations to analyze:

• + With merged mining, generating namecoins is much more difficult - 40% of Bitcoin (although more people are getting them now). It is probable that many merge-mined namecoins are being discarded by uninterested miners,
• + You can redeem namecoin for domain names (although they are approaching free now), in addition to it being a currency,
• + Namecoins used to purchase domain names are destroyed and removed from the money supply forever,
• - It is doubtful that many have or ever will commonly use namecoin as DNS. It may be more practical as a place to register names for other purposes,
• the exchange rate is also affected by BTC-USD value fluctuation.
  

[Cosbycoin]

A few considerations to analyze:

• + With merged mining, generating namecoins is much more difficult - 40% of Bitcoin (although more people are getting them now). It is probable that many merge-mined namecoins are being discarded by uninterested miners,
• + You can redeem namecoin for domain names (although they are approaching free now), in addition to it being a currency,
• + Namecoins used to purchase domain names are destroyed and removed from the money supply forever,
• - It is doubtful that many have or ever will commonly use namecoin as DNS. It may be more practical as a place to register names for other purposes,
• the exchange rate is also affected by BTC-USD value fluctuation.
  

Well it looks like the dot-bit.org site is down and so is its forum.

Looks like namecoin on a discussion basis has lost much community interest.

Bummers.

[worldinacoin]

It is up for me, but the procedure of browing dot bit is too troublesome for me to start using it.

[eleuthria]

NMC has been on a tear lately.  I'm curious to know the reason behind the recent run up  

Low volume on both sides [buy & sell] makes it easy to create an artificial price surge.  Basic Pump & Dump.  Problem is there aren't many real buyers either, so the attempts to pump up the price tend to just fall flat when anybody decides to cash out.

[drakahn]

It is up for me, but the procedure of browing dot bit is too troublesome for me to start using it.

I haven't tried the .reg... but that seems really easy

[Deafboy]

It is up for me, but the procedure of browing dot bit is too troublesome for me to start using it.

If you just want to try, all you need to do is use one of DNS servers listed on http://dot-bit.org/HowToBrowseBitDomains#Replace_your_DNS_server_with_a_compatible_one
But from my experience they have trouble resolving some domains from time to time. If you have issues, just change the settings back to your providers DNS.

[Comepradz]

Namecoin is mentioned as possible decentralized DNS for Project Meshnet
https://wiki.projectmeshnet.org/DNS#Namecoin